Friday, December 18, 2015

Using the Dissimilarity Index to measure racial segregation, this his is how the most segregated cities in the US and Brazil compare. A remarkable difference, which I would love to understand more before making any comments.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

I'm not sure if I have mentioned here in the blog the relatively new journal Spatial Demography. In any case, it promises to be a great journal for population studies, with an incredible editoral board and some very interesting publications.

Here is the US racial dot map. The two maps are not 100% comparable since the racial categories used in both maps are not exactly the same, but they give a rough comparison of how white and black populations are spatially distributed in both countries.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

it's my birthday today. I'm completing my 32nd lap around the Sun, so I just dropped by to say thanks. Life has been wonderful and I'm truly grateful for being so lucky about so many things, specially about having so many amazing people around me.

Over the past four decades, bicycle ownership has been documented in various countries but not globally analyzed. This paper presents an effort to fill this gap by tracking household bicycle possession. First, we gather survey data from 150 countries and extract percentage household bicycle ownership values. Performing cluster analysis, we determined four groups with the weighted mean percentage ownership ranging from 20% to 81%. Generally, bicycle ownership was highest in Northern Europe and lowest in West, Central and North Africa, and Central Asia. We determine worldwide household ownership patterns and demonstrate a basis for understanding the global impact of cycling as a sustainable transit mode. Furthermore, we find a lower-bound estimate of the number of bicycles available to the world׳s households. We establish that at the global level 42% of households own at least one bicycle, and thus there are at least 580 million bicycles in private household ownership. Our data are publicly available and amenable for future analyses.